The United States of America in The Year 2050

The Dominion is the current government of the United States of America. It is a Protestant-rooted government, now in power since 2020, when it took over the previous government and replaced it with a theocracy.

The movement had its roots in right-wing conservatism, beginning with the corruption and weakening of American democracy under Ronald Reagan. Further degradation of the American Republic occurred under succeeding Presidents, and culminating in the final nails in the proverbial coffin pounded in by George W. Bush and Barack Obama, both under the baleful influence of the terrorist campaigns of Osama bin Laden and a variety of terrorist networks. In effect the Americans were terrified by fanatic theocrats into creating a dictatorship of theocrats.

The initial movement, rooted in the Tea Party, was funded secretly by a cabal of billionaires and millionaires, including many who were responsible for bringing down the American and world economies late in the first decade of the century. These men, including the Koch brothers and other wealthy right-wing families, wanted to have the power of government to themselves, to create the American world so that it would benefit them and to hell with the four hundred million American citizens who actually made their wealth possible.

Their miscalculation involved the religious right, especially the people of the Dominionist movement, a Christian sect that believed it should, could, and would rule the country and create a nation that functioned according to Biblical law tempered by the philosophy of Jesus Christ. The cabal of wealth attempted to use the religious right, including the Dominionists, to further their own agenda, knowing that the American people were not, generally speaking, the brightest lights in the closet and would fall hook, line, and sinker, for a movement professing to clean up Washington and bring morality back to the nation. They were right, of course, especially given that they were responsible for the degradation of education and the dumbing down of the press.

What they didn’t count on was the determination of the Christian sects to rule, especially the Dominionist sect. Intellectually the cabal was outmatched by the Dominion, despite the Dominion religious delusion. But the Dominionists believed in their delusion, believed wholeheartedly that they were the chosen ones, born to lead the nation into the bosom of Jesus Christ, even if a few people had to die under torture on the way to the promised land. Not a few of those were members of the cabal.

The cabal pumped money into political campaigns that featured seemingly moderate candidates with a religious bent, candidates who were Dominion but who were careful to keep their deeper views under wraps. As the cabal controlled the press and the press had long since decided to act like lapdogs to wealth and power, the electorate, most of it, bought the story of a return to honesty and integrity in government and were willing to admit a strong religious element as well. So seat after seat, in the House and the Senate, the Dominion gradually took over Congress. It took only a few years. In 2020 they took the Presidency, throwing out the incumbent, a man wholly owned by the cabal. In 2020 the Dominion had taken over the government of the United States, legally, at the ballot box, although they were dishonest about it.

In 2020 the gloves came off. The military, long a hotbed of Christian religious fundamentalist fever, went along with the new program and became a domestic enforcement arm of the new government. Throughout society Catholics and Jews were eased out, or thrown out, of positions of influence, replaced with loyal Protestant hacks. The courts were turned into religious courts. The schools were required to teach the Bible and Dominionist theology. Liberal professors and administrations in colleges were removed, replaced with dogmatists. Teaching evolution was outlawed. Social Security, Medicare, the entire Democratic New Deal platform of programs, all were scrapped under the guise of personal responsibility and self-reliance and dependence on the god of the Dominionists.

And the people bought it. They had long since allowed themselves to be castrated by a corporate press, by a consumer ideology, and by a weak education system. There was grumbling, of course, but the grumblers somehow managed to disappear and after a while the grumbling stopped and people got on with their lives as best they could, and kept silent while at it – after all, there seemed to be spies everywhere – you couldn’t trust the neighbors anymore.

There were during this time many battles between the Dominion’s military arms and various Protestant sects that disagreed with Dominion theology, though very few of them disagreed with the religious takeover of the government. These were street battles, militia wars, gang fights even. Though fewer, they continue into the present.

The Dominion’s foreign policy caused consternation in the world, though it was cheered by the wingnut yahoos on the home front. After all, they controlled the most powerful armies and arsenals in the world, and were quite willing to use them in the name of God. The Vatican War in 2030, though it lasted only a few hours until Vatican City was reduced to rubble, put the world on notice, and the world cowered. The Europeans knew what they were up against: their history was full of the depredations of religious tyrants, and since the Europeans were no match for the military might of America they simply stood back and waited for the drama to play out.

The nuclear destruction of Tehran, Baghdad, Cairo, and Beijing followed soon after the Vatican War, and then there was no one to pose a credible threat to the Americans. The Russians simply crawled into their shell and the world hunkered down to wait out these new, deadly Americans.

2 Responses

“And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.” – Jesus

Interesting thoughts. There are always those who will use any system – religion, government, education, art – to control and oppress others. Is it the system that is corrupt, or the individual who uses it? Sometimes it is hard to say, and hard to see.

I don’t think the People’s Republic of China or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea would go gently into their good nights. We have more throw weight, but unless we have, as the Soviets were said to have, the ability to target each and every mile of our Adversary’s road and rail networks, the precise targeting of a few high-value targets may have most of the practical effect of a more broadly based but less discriminating attack. The first warhead turns everything to rubble; the second just makes the rubble bounce.